I just finished this book, but could have recommended it before opening it. As a long-time reader of Stout, I can tell you that his plotting is impeccable, his denouements unfailingly surprising and his command of the language masterful. The first story, "A Window for Death," has long been one of my favorites, featuring as it does Stout's usual suspects--class, money and sexual tension--in the story of a black sheep returning to the fold and mysteriously dying. The other two tales are tasty, too; in "Immune to Death," Stout's lazy and unwilling detective, Nero Wolfe, gets involved in an international fight over oil rights, and in "Too Many Detectives," he is caught in an investigation regarding illegal wire tapping. I will read a Stout--any Stout, even the occasional romance novel--again and again, whenever I get my hands on one, and I always pass them around to anyone who loves a mystery. They're fast, hilarious, arrogant, profoundly unrealistic and fun, with the air of an old comic thriller movie, like Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" or one starring Edna Mae Oliver. Don't be put off by the undercurrent of misogyny, I'm a flaming, old-school feminist and if I can laugh at such sheer ridiculousness, so can you.
